Idea Lab

Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications. Here's where we stand: Two scholarship winners are now almost midway through their Medill studies. A third candidate will enroll next month. And we still have the equivalent of six full scholarships yet to award. From the beginning, I've felt that this project's biggest challenge would...

• May 26, 2008
• 13 comments

How Will We Find the Programmer- Journalists?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Thanks to the Knight News Challenge, the Medill School of Journalism can offer full scholarships to our master's program to people with computer programming backgrounds. The first two are on campus now. We're looking for seven more -- and they're not easy to find. Part of the problem lies in the nature of what we're trying to do: attract people to journalism school who might not even be thinking about journalism school as an option. And part of the problem is that journalism school requires students to do things -- like interview strangers and do a lot of writing --...

• April 6, 2008
• 1 comment

What Do You Get When You Mix a Journalist and a Programmer?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We don't know, but thanks to the Knight News Challenge, we're going to find out. Earlier this year, the good folks at the Knight Foundation gave us money to offer full scholarships to Medill's graduate journalism program to people with strong backgrounds in computer programming. Geeks don't usually apply to journalism schools, but Adrian Holovaty demonstrates regularly that someone with both journalism and technology skills can come up with ideas -- and carry them off -- that most of us wouldn't even think of. As soon as the grant was announced in May, the team at Medill started scrambling. We...

• October 16, 2007
• No comments